Snapshot

I am sitting in a late-night house with a catastrophic kitchen and a fresh pumpkin pie at my back. There’s a dangerous mixture of Coke and condensed milk swilling around in my stomach. I think my teeth are dissolving. (There may be someone, somewhere, who can resist drinking condensed milk straight out of the tin, but it isn’t me. Thanks for that by the way, Enid Blyton.)

Good Will Hunting has just finished.

Henry is asleep. Earlier, he woke up cross in his little stripy hoodie, and laid down on the rug to whinge. I slid off the sofa to lie down next to him and he beamed all over his chubby face, a couple of inches from mine. We lay on our backs, side by side, and talked about light fixtures, in which he is greatly interested at the moment. Later, cross again, he went to fling himself against the wall to show me how terribly awful it was, realised that bit of the wall was actually a sharp corner, and flung himself very gently after a couple of aborted attempts. He’s melodramatic to the core, but not stupid.

We went to Tesco late in matching nerdy red raincoats. He was so tired he sat hallucinating in the trolley, making little monkey noises only I could hear.

I finished Black Swan Green this afternoon. I want to wolf whistle at David Mitchell’s turn of phrase. It doesn’t seem to matter what he’s writing about: he says ‘jump’, and words say ‘how high?’

Timothy – finally, finally – is back tomorrow. I have been listening to the Wicked soundtrack this week and so want to tell him, as he sits in a hotel bar somewhere drinking lime cordial, that he is the handprint on my heart. But I think that might be a bit lame.

I have made him a pie, instead.

I read a post earlier about what it feels like to be in your forties. It made me think. I have years and years of incident to come. Changes and babies and birthdays, gains and losses. It will all be important. I just don’t want my forty-year-old to forget that once I was twenty-seven, and sat with a pumpkin pie and an evening like this at my back. I’ll only have this post to remind me. I hope I caught it right.